The Baldest Truth

What will Tuesday’s one-game playoff between the Twins and Tigers look like to viewers three decades from now? Different, if history is a guide. Very, very different.

While channel-surfing over the weekend, I happened upon the MLB Network's airing of the famous (or infamous, if you’re a Bostonian) 1978 Yankees-Red Sox showdown - The Bucky Bleepin' Dent Game.

As a college freshman back then, I skipped all of my afternoon classes to watch it in my dorm room. On my trusty, 19-inch, black-and-white Zenith with the rabbit-ear antenna, of course.

I had seen bits and pieces of the game since, but this weekend marked the first time I re-experienced it in its entirety. While watching it this time on my 50-inch HD Sony, so many things struck me as interesting ...

The graphics and camera angles were from another era - sometime between the Cenozoic and Precambrian, I believe.

I mean, we couldn't even see Dent's home run. We never saw the ball off the bat, never saw the flight, never saw it settle into the net above the Green Monster. If the announcers hadn't told us it was a homer and if we hadn't seen Dent's gleeful trot around the bases, we never would have known.

To look at him, Goose Gossage didn’t seem especially intimidating.

For one thing, he didn't have the menacing mustache that became his trademark. For another, as my wife said: "Jeez, look at how little he is." And Goose wasn't the only bigger-than-life figure who actually wasn’t very big at all. Jim Rice was borderline skinny. Ron Guidry couldn't have weighed 165 pounds. Even Reggie Jackson bore little resemblance to today’s home-run hitters.

Here was the most fearsome reliever of the era, two future Hall of Fame sluggers and a dominant power pitcher ... and they practically were stick figures. Who could have known that in less than a decade, bulked-up, bench-pressing ballplayers would be using their keisters as pincushions?

Situational pitching - one-batter relief specialists and set-up men - was still a twinkle in Tony La Russa’s eye.

Leading 2-0, Boston starter Mike Torrez got into trouble in the seventh. As soon as Jim Spencer was announced as a pinch-hitter, just about any of today's managers would have gotten a lefty into the game pronto. Don Zimmer, as was the norm then, left Torrez in. Torrez got Spencer out but, within a New York minute, Dent was a legend.

Guidry, meanwhile, was working his third straight start on 3-days' rest - his only outings with fewer than 4-days’ rest the entire season - and he had pitched complete games his previous two times out. Though he clearly didn't have the kind of stuff that made him a 25-game winner that year, Bob Lemon let him pitch into the seventh inning.

Back then, an All-Star closer really earned his paycheck.

When Guidry finally did depart with one out in the seventh, he was replaced by Gossage, who got the final eight outs for the save. It was the 39th time that year Goose worked more than one inning - including five outings of at least 2 2-3 innings in the season’s final three weeks. It also was the 35th time he entered a game with runners on base.

Those were saves - unlike the wussy saves “earned” by today’s overpaid closers, who almost always enter a game to start the ninth and just about never work more than one inning. It makes one appreciate throwback Mariano Rivera all the more.

Lou Piniella was a darn good ballplayer.

These days, most people think of Piniella as an almost-retired, former hellraiser of a manager with a beachball stuffed under his uniform. But there he was 31 years ago, batting third on a great Yankees team that included Jackson, Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss. He wasn’t a home-run guy but was a reliable clutch bat with gap power.

I remembered all that. What I had forgotten was that he was an underrated outfielder whose intelligence and instincts made up for his lack of speed. Piniella saved two sixth-inning runs with a running catch near the right-field line, and he saved the game in the ninth when he prevented the tying run from scoring by acting as if he was going to catch a ball he had lost briefly in Fenway’s wicked afternoon sun. As a result, Rick Burleson only went from first to second on Jerry Remy’s one-out single and couldn’t score when the next batter, Rice, hit a deep fly. Carl Yastrzemski then popped out, ending one of baseball’s most memorable afternoons.

Unlike today, when even little guys swing for the fences on every pitch, ballplayers back then knew their roles and realized their limitations.

At least a half-dozen hitters in that game - including Dent - choked up several inches on the bat. By doing so, they increased their chances of fouling off a tough pitch and living to see another. Before delivering his Beantown bomb, Dent fouled a nasty slider off of his left foot and limped around for several minutes. We’ll never know how the delay affected Torrez, but we already know how it affected Dent - and history.

Read Mike Nadel's musings daily at TheBaldestTruth.com.